Writer & Unabashed Dog Lover

All posts filed under: JAFF

With warmth, wit, and infinite charm Pamela Mingle brings to the page Pride and Prejudice’s reserved and awkward Mary Bennet and proves that there is always room for another Austen spin-off when it’s this good. For most of her life Mary Bennet has been an object of ridicule. With a notable absence of the social graces, she has been an embarrassment to her family on more than one occasion. But lately, Mary has changed. She’s matured and attained a respectable, if somewhat unpolished, decorum. But her peace and contentment are shattered when her sister Lydia turns up-very pregnant and separated from Wickham. Mary and Kitty are bustled off to stay with Jane and her husband. It is there that Mary meets Henry Walsh, whose attentions confound her. Unschooled in the game of love, her heart and her future are at risk. Is she worthy of love or should she take the safer path? In her journey of self-acceptance, she discovers the answer. (GoodReads)

Summary: Vanessa Roberts, a PR queen, has the envious task of shepherding around Julian Chancellor, a Mr. Darcy lookalike, at multiple JASNA conferences and finds herself growing more and more distracted by his multiple charms, but he’s an old-fashioned kind of guy, and she’s purely 21st-c. tech. The two are just not compatible. Then there’s also that business with that pesky pirate. 😉 * — *

Kelsey Edmundson has had her own encounter with a Mr. Wickham in her love life, so she rejects the idea of a quickie rebound, especially if it’s Ricky, her best friend’s boyfriend’s friend, or that hottie Aussie bartender at the club, Mark Barnes. Turning to her favorite Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice, to drown her sorrows, Kelsey gets sucked into the fictional world of Pride and Prejudice, just not as Lizzy. Will dallying inside one of the world’s greatest love stories help her rewrite her own?

Warning: This book contains at least one explicit sexual scene and may not be appropriate for readers under the age of 18. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman teetering on the verge of thirty must be in want of a husband. Not true for Manhattanite Elizabeth Scott. Instead of planning a walk down the aisle, she’s crossing the pond with the only companion she needs; her darling dog, Bliss. Caring for a pack of show dogs in England seems the perfect distraction from the scandal that ruined her teaching career, and her reputation, in New York. What she doesn’t count on is an unstoppable attraction to billionaire dog breeder Donovan Darcy. The London tycoon’s a little bit arrogant, a whole lot sexy, and the chemistry between them is disarming. When passion is finally unleashed, might Elizabeth hope to take home more than a blue ribbon?

“The garden in which stands my humble abode is separated only by a lane from Rosings Park, her ladyship’s residence.” (Mr. Collins to Mrs. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice, Vol. I, Chapter 14). Abigail Reynolds tweaks this small detail of Pride and Prejudice, altering it to become one of the many rivers in Kent, and in doing so, opens the door for a flood (pun intended) of consequences for Miss Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, trapped and unchaperoned at Hunsford. According to the Amazon.com description, there were real floods taking place during the spring of 1811. This became the basis for the novel.

My Jane Austen Summer is about the internal struggle of a young woman dealing with a lot of life changes in a short amount of time and the anger under the surface she fails to deal with. The author creates a mutual empathy for the protagonist, Lily, by causing that same anger at the indignity of Lily’s surroundings. I found this frustrating at first because — who wants to be angry while reading? 40% of the way through the book, I took a break to think through the writers’ motivations for presenting the novel using this storytelling method. In doing so, I turned to the source material, Mansfield Park. When I think of Mansfield Park, I think of Fanny Price, the girl who came from an impoverished background to live in a great house. Her mother, Lady Bertram’s sister, left the wealth of her upbringing to marry for love. Even though Fanny Price then is only a generation away from all that wealth, the stigma of poverty attached to her is permanently affixed to her …

This was a difficult book for me to read as my first foray into the Jane Austen/Regency mystery genre. Although only 409 pages long, I found the mystery format difficult to embrace. The traditional whodunit format of investigator questioning and answering that I associate with mysteries was not present until the last 50 pages or so of the book. Prior to this, the deaths seemed to be unrelated and left me with many questions about the perpetrator(s) involved and their motives. Then there was the sex. Like most Darcy/Elizabeth sequels, the sexual tension that existed in Pride and Prejudice is replaced by the intimate relations between husband and wife. Jeffers spares the reader from a too-detailed description, generalizing and in some cases, taking the event off-stage at the beginning. Later, we become voyeurs watching as their coupling is described in more details by the villain(s)’ perspective. Anyone reading a book entitled The Phantom of Pemberley should be familiar, if not an ardent admirer, of Pride and Prejudice. So, it came as somewhat of a …